Could it be the content that is getting churned out isn't GOOD content?

The new face of MMOs center around story-telling, something WoW has never done well despite having a large backstory to pull from. Players are forced to read huge walls to text to get any of this story and after killing 30 pigs colored red it gets a bit old after awhile.

WoW's problem has never been a lack of content, it's always been a lack of QUALITY content. For every fun quest, there's 20 more that are typical, uninspired grinds.

Avecrien wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 15:05:
I left the game on account of restrictions to playstyle. Classes get refined until there's no flavor or fun left to them. The endgame was a landscape, now its a queue at the DMV.
I'm not going to pay them just so I can play what they want, how they want, where they want.

I've been itching for Diablo 3 for a decade, but the most recent round of info on that game has completely killed my interest. I think Blizz has lost touch with their customers. Shame, as they were once so dependable and steadfast in favor of the gamer over the corporate man.

blizz are not making games for the gamers anymore

[TL;DR - Blizzard needs to stop doing what they are doing and listen to what the players would like.

thats what they are doing , by nerf nerf nerf the game ,

I left the game on account of restrictions to playstyle. Classes get refined until there's no flavor or fun left to them. The endgame was a landscape, now its a queue at the DMV.
I'm not going to pay them just so I can play what they want, how they want, where they want.

I've been itching for Diablo 3 for a decade, but the most recent round of info on that game has completely killed my interest. I think Blizz has lost touch with their customers. Shame, as they were once so dependable and steadfast in favor of the gamer over the corporate man.

This is the biggest problem from what I saw. I played on an RP server, where there were only a handful of real raiding guilds (if that), so it wound up with large portions of our population just being cut off from what they had been doing in the past...so they went for the content they would do otherwise, which were dungeons or heroic dungeons.

*put on tinfoil hat*

I always had the impression that there was an underlying meaning to the difficulty of raids and that was to give the new developers time to slug through creating the next tier of raids. In retrospect, all the balance issues, hot fixing, and delays gives me the impression that the new team is having a hard time filling the shoes of those who worked through TBC and WotLK content and needed to provide a steep learning curve for players to stifle progression.

In between all of this, we are given two rehashed dungeons to start another absurd subplot with the Zandalari which will likely never be touched on again in the game and require a book to 'tie up' the events in the same way they did with The Shattering.

From there, they only designed half a raid as they put all the tier gear in to one zone with half the bosses of, say, Ulduar which also had full tier. This creates another artificial difficulty for the players where, in 10 man, only two pieces of gear will drop in a HUGE loot table and can potentially stifle progression once again.

So, now we're being told 4.3 will be the largest content update since Cataclysm and will be released this year but have yet to provide any details aside from datamining speculation. I suspect they will either release an update which is far from the quality the community is asking for and hot fixed over several months or they are pulling work away from 'Titan' to meet this deadline.

/tinfoil hat

Beelzebud wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 12:30:
Either I'm misreading the community, or he is.

I got burned out and left WoW, after 3 years of leading a raiding guild, because frankly the content never slowed down, and made the game a perpetual treadmill.

There is no time to enjoy the content, because they barely give regular guilds a chance to do it before they start nerfing the difficulty and pushing a new raid out. I got severe burn out, and left. There were times in WotLK where we wouldn't even wear epic gear for a month before we were replacing it with newer stuff. There is no valley, just an unending uphill climb.

Exactly on point IMHO. Blizzard's focus is purely on the last level of content and continuously pushing it as far as it can go before boosting the level cap another 5 levels.

There is NOTHING to leveling up a character other than getting to 85 because you level so fast none of it matters. Dungeons, raids, PVP, reputation, items, crafting, etc. is all pointless until you hit the level cap.

So, the majority of the content that Blizzard has made for World of Warcraft is worthless because they've elected to concentrate exclusively on endgame content.

There is nothing fulfilling or epic about what originally made World of Warcraft great because they've turned it into treadmill without any time to rest and feel a sense of achievement.

And now they think that putting more things on the treadmill is going to have people crawling back for more? Yeah right.

Hehe its kinda funny a 2004 game makes a fuzz like this

Maybe its time to make a new game Blizz?

Wallshadows wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 14:14:
For starters, they intentionally made Cataclysm much more difficult to jump in to then Wrath and I would even go as far back as The Burning Crusade in terms of raiding. Where there was once incremental steps of progression between Heroic dungeons and entry-level raiding (Karazhan, Naxxramas), they threw it out the window and put a lot of players in the middle. They had run the Heroic dungeons and got gear, but could not do the raiding content effectively due to the difficulty.

This is the biggest problem from what I saw. I played on an RP server, where there were only a handful of real raiding guilds (if that), so it wound up with large portions of our population just being cut off from what they had been doing in the past...so they went for the content they would do otherwise, which were dungeons or heroic dungeons.

At that point, your chances of having fun for that gaming session hinge entirely on the quality of the people you find with the dungeon finder. With the harder content, it splintered the community and drove people away; the hardcore were kicking people who didn't have gear to just plow the content, which left the more casual crowd on my server cut off from large parts of the game (even ones they should have been able to be doing) not just because of the game changes, but because of the community reaction to them.

Karazhan and Naxx were places where fairly casual people could go and still participate. With Cataclysm it got to be a massive headache to even go to regular instances, forget about casual raiding. All that left were spread out and sporadic daily quests for rewards that weren't worth the trouble.

Another thing which I would like to bring up is how stale the actual world of Azeroth has become. Upon the shattering, it basically eliminated all class/profession quests and neutered all world elites to either be regular mobs or completely removed from the game such as the world dragons.

This leaves little to no reason to actually explore the world, provide a sense of danger while out in the wild or challenge players.

avianflu wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 12:26:
i am growing more convinced that Diablo 3 is being crafted to bring in those bored WOW subscribers. The D3 auction house screen even looks very much like the WOW auction house screen.

They never actually named their next 'secret' MMO, did they? It's Diablo 3.

Creston

One of the things I was most looking forward to in Cataclysm was the revamped old world and leveling game. That had always been my favorite part of WoW. The problem was that I leveled WAY TOO FAST. I'd level out of a zone before I was halfway through it.

A friend of mine commented on this to me recently. They have some serious pacing problems, you shouldn't have to spend 5 hours in a single zone if you don't want to but you also shouldn't outlevel the whole thing before even finishing the story arc quests there.

Blizzard needs to actually listen to their user base rather then brush them off and do what they feel is right. The content for Cataclysm was scrutinized nearly upon release and it only got worse as more and more players are able to grind through with little to nothing to do; whether it was raiding or casually doing dailies.

For starters, they intentionally made Cataclysm much more difficult to jump in to then Wrath and I would even go as far back as The Burning Crusade in terms of raiding. Where there was once incremental steps of progression between Heroic dungeons and entry-level raiding (Karazhan, Naxxramas), they threw it out the window and put a lot of players in the middle. They had run the Heroic dungeons and got gear, but could not do the raiding content effectively due to the difficulty. The way they handled melee and range encounters was appalling as well.

Fortunately for me, I was able to do lots of content before the 4.2 nerfs but I know of many, many players and guilds who were left in this heroic dungeon - raiding limbo and ultimately turned them away from not only raiding, but the game as well. I can understand that Blizzard wanted to implement a more difficult raiding environment, but they lost sight of how progression was handled prior to Cataclysm to give everyone the ability to progress.

Secondly, class balance through nerfs and buffs need to be handled much more efficiently before being released to the wild. It seems to have become better now, but it still happens.

Third, if they intend to bring quality content back to the community, they need to dump the team handling the Cataclysm content right now. They've pretty much sat on their hands to deliver us a 7 boss raid with no companion dungeon and rehashed two older instances to push another subplot which will likely get a disappointing payoff.

As a raider, The Burning Crusade has since been the high point of this game because it released with a lot of raids which actually had progression in mind for both loot and encounters as opposed to the blanket '359' with the Cataclysm release. This really bothered me because the gear which dropped off Magmaw was of equal stat value as that from Nefarian whereas the drop off, say, Moroes was lesser then Prince Malchezaar.

TL;DR - Blizzard needs to stop doing what they are doing and listen to what the players would like.

Another million or so this Holiday season. People are playing it (Wow) out of boredom due to a blah year in gaming (imo).

Skyrim = Subs getting dropped.

BF3 = Subs getting dropped.

Call of Duty (as much as i hate to say it)= subs getting dropped.

Starwars the old republic IF it goes live before Christmas = Tons of dropped subscriptions.

Most WoW players don't even know those games exist. If anything their will be more people coming in, with parents renewing the subscriptions of kids and such.

He says the players have become faster at consuming content. That's funny, because I tried to go slowly and couldn't!

One of the things I was most looking forward to in Cataclysm was the revamped old world and leveling game. That had always been my favorite part of WoW. The problem was that I leveled WAY TOO FAST. I'd level out of a zone before I was halfway through it. I suppose I could have turned off XP gain, but that just seemed silly and required frequent trips to a main city.

Then of course you hit 60 in a couple weeks and it's Outland again, for the billionth time! Yay!

Plus the 80-85 content was so on-rails I couldn't imagine doing it with all my characters. The Indiana Jones zone was kind of embarrassing and a clunky retcon to boot.

So you accidentally rush to the end and have super-hard and time consuming heroics to look forward to. Oh, and half the number of dungeons as previous expansions, so enjoy those over and over!

So, yeah. Not surprised the numbers are going down. I quit three months after Cata for what truly feels like the last time this time.

DangerDog wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 14:09:
Develop more content = make it pure hell of a grind to level up or whatever.

This it the truth

Shok wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 13:53:
To be fair, they remade all the vanilla zones to enable players to fly in them. And remade a lot of starter quests, etc. So maybe their focus should have been on more higher end content. Instead I think they just decided to have less high end content but make it hard as hell.

Oh yeah. They did a lot of work in the old world, don't get me wrong. Credit where it's due: they basically recreated it from scratch.

But in the process, that meant they had to redo questing/landscape from 1-60, while at the same time, try to get enough content to keep high level players interested.

Develop more content = make it pure hell of a grind to level up or whatever.

Just created an account for bluesnews just for this

I m reading the site for a long time (1997 -1998)

on topic now

best way to gain more interest in wow is not by adding new content
but to remove the endless grinding for loot, at least that's why I quit a few weeks ago.

+ basic economics, when demand is low, lower your price (it has worked in the past)

To be fair, they remade all the vanilla zones to enable players to fly in them. And remade a lot of starter quests, etc. So maybe their focus should have been on more higher end content. Instead I think they just decided to have less high end content but make it hard as hell.

Dev wrote on Aug 4, 2011, 13:24:
Don't forget, there's not just D3 coming up from blizzard to take subscribers. Theres also the next unnamed MMO that blizz is working on. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the only thing to ever top WoW (and topple it)... is the next MMO from blizzard. And I'm certain blizz is planning for that event.

THe new MMOG will 'not' compete with WoW. That is what blizzard has said, and early rumors suggest 'Titan' as it's codenamed, is a casual MMOG. Now things might change now that WoW is hemorrhaging as it is, but still at the rate Blizzard develops MMOGs it'll be six years before we see it.

And Illumin is right, there's a lot of games that are going to take WoW subs, but non-MMOGs won't really affect them so much accept for perhaps the one month when they come out. However Star Wars: The Old Republic 'IS' hitting before Christmas, so that's gonna be a huge chunk of people right there. On top of that Guild Wars 2, which has picked up a tremendous following for obvious reasons, is very likely to hit early next year, that's going to be even more subs lost in WoW.

In the end I don't really buy their explanation of 'people are going through content quicker'. I'd say thats partly true sure but it's more the fact that WoW has become, more than ever, a 'job'. You log in, you do your dailies, run your random, do your guild raid, log out. Next day you do it all over again. All the while your doing this your just sitting in the city waiting for the queue. WoW has just lost it's spark.